sus.

The premise

sus. is a social platform for sharing candid dating experiences, especially stories from online dating. It gives people a place to compare notes, be honest, and feel less alone.

My role

I joined as a technical co-founder, partnering closely with Lawrence on product and engineering. I ship features on both the React Native app and native iOS — especially iOS — and maintain the TypeScript backend. The React Native app was the original prototype and stays around to support Android; I'm leading the port to Swift and SwiftUI, which rethinks navigation and interactions for iOS rather than transliterating the prototype into a second codebase.

Making it feel native

A lot of my design work is about earning the "this feels like an iPhone app" reaction. The change I'm most fond of is small: I raised the tab bar off the bottom edge so it floats the way Apple's newer Liquid Glass language does — a detail most users will never name, but everyone feels. When a design question is genuinely open, I prototype the competing directions as working screens, so the conversation with Lawrence is about two things we can hold, not two things we imagine.

I also studied how the apps we compete with handle their surfaces — what their feeds, posting flows, and detail pages get right — and ported the practices worth stealing. That work fed a redesign of the post and help pages, and it's shaping features still on the bench, like emotional reactions: how someone should be able to respond to a raw, personal story with something warmer than a like button.

Product judgment

I help turn user feedback into features and shape moderation policy for a sensitive social space. The central tradeoff is protecting people from harmful behavior without making honest participation feel surveilled or constrained. The app is instrumented with Sentry for crash monitoring and PostHog for product analytics, so those calls get made against what users actually do rather than what we assume.

Outcome

sus. is live on the App Store as sus. — real dating stories. The ongoing work spans product strategy, native mobile, cross-platform development, and backend engineering.